Cho and the Void That's In Us All

Yeah blame it on the illness. At what point does a rotten system start generating its own vermin? Cho--as sick as he was--was a product of various siocialization processes that obviously twisted him and did not work.

All other reasons given for this violence are rationalizations--gun laws, health care, insanity pleas--etc. What the system that created this man wants you to believe is that he was just insane, a loner, a genetic mutant. He was not, he was the system's spawn.

Unfortunately, I think Cho's last words will be prophetic. This act will indeed "inspire" other angst-filled, alienated, dispossessed young people to do what he did. As I predicted ten years ago, Cho's act is political, as was Columbine, simply because it is the bloody inarticulate inchoate of rebellion against an injustice that's barely recognizable in conventional terms.

In some ways, Heidegger was right: we have to wait for the future to make it possible to think the essence of nihilism. Cho and others (to come) like him are the harbingers of that nihilistic void that lives at the heart of us all.

[xposted as a comment at Leninology]